The footballer, the Saudi prince and the proposition

Huh? Trouble? Or perhaps that should read inconvenience. As he says, he feels no bitterness about it all. And why should he? Before reading the entire article I was expecting some kind of horror show. What I gleaned was that O'Keefe spent a while in Saudi Arabia, was given a lot of money, earned a lot of money, was given Rolls Royce and Pontiac cars for free, an apartment for free, dined at the most exclusive hotels and restaurants for free, stayed at the most luxurious hotels for free, in fact, wanted for nothing.

And then one night Abdullah makes a verbal pass at him, which is not responded to, and the gravy train derails. The gifts stopped, the free money and lunches and travel stopped. Is that what you call trouble?

And all the hoo har about not being allowed out of Saudi because he now knew a big, big secret about Abdullah and would surely be killed. He got out of Saudi without getting his hands chopped off or getting a flogging. He got on the plane as healthy as he had got off it when he first arrived there.

Come off it. Talk about flogging a dead horse (no pun meant) but this is just a run-of-the-mill article that makes for ten or 15 minutes light reading.



Rot. The official is really gonna be f***ing about all day trawling through newspapers with a pair of scissors. The whole paper would have been confiscated, if this incident really happened at all.

And safely back in England O'Keefe receives a fax from Riyadh with a list of financial points. More trouble...



Of course he didn't - because he never had to. He was given everything. He's probably made a few quid out of this article - or rather from the suckers who fund the BBC. Fair play to him, but he shouldn't be looking so annoyingly hard done by and wistful in his present-day photo.